It's All Money: Virtual Currency Inspires Online Workers as Much as the Real Thing

We recently caught up with CrowdFlower, the company that assigns the workers to their tasks, to see how the partnership is working. CrowdFlower has a good overview, since it functions as an intermediary between companies with jobs to do — everything from doing online rating and tagging to transcription services — and crowdsourced labor.

Alongside the workers sent from Gambit, CrowdFlower’s other main source of labor is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which supplies workers who are paid in real-world currency. The surprising result: Gambit’s virtual-currency laborers are performing at a comparable level to Turk’s regularly paid workers.

“Gambit workers and Turk workers both produce work above 80% accuracy on average (and are within 1 percent of each other) and maintain about comparable throughput,” we were told by John Le, a data analyst at CrowdFlower. While Le discouraged a direct comparison between the two groups of workers because they work under different rules, he was able to determine that Gambit workers were performing well. “The aggregate work they produce is similar to the accuracy and throughput of Turkers.” he said.

The rate of return for Gambit workers is lower, at 24 percent, of whom only 48 percent complete a full 30 minutes of work (the minimum time block for a Gambit worker). By comparison to other offers and repeat purchase rates for virtual currency, though, those numbers aren’t too bad, and they do suggest that there’s a growing group of people who regularly work for virtual currency.

At some point in the future, it’s possible that having workers perform well for an in-game currency will be unremarkable. It should also be pointed out that CrowdFlower has ways of weeding out non-performing workers, and Turkers typically make very little per task — meaning they’re probably less motivated than better-paid workers would be. But for now, the idea of getting people to labor for virtual currency is still new, and brings up a number of questions.

One of those is what the motivators are to work for virtual currency. Gambit works with a number of massively multiplayer online games, portals, reward sites and social communities. While we weren’t given any stats on how workers from specific games perform, Gambit CEO Andrew Hunter did note that not all games and sites are equal. “Effectiveness varies heavily by game/site,” he told us by email. “Some apps complete near zero tasks despite having great traffic, and some sites complete tons despite having lower amounts of traffic. Tasks are enticing for those users that are less inclined to pay, so we notice an inverse relationship with paid transactions.”

Those “less inclined to pay”, of course, are often the young. What that may mean in the future is that a teenager’s first job won’t be at the burger joint down the street — it could instead be online, through a game, involving hours of tedious clicking instead of burger flipping.

Another question is whether gamers will continue to perform over time, or even come to be more efficient than some other forms of low-paid crowdsourced labor. In a way, playing online games is like training for repetitive work tasks; and since the economies in question are virtual, it may be possible for the virtual-currency workers to make more than they otherwise would.

We’ll leave any more speculation until a later time. But it’s worth pointing out that a number of techno-prophets (Vernor Vinge, for instance) have suggested futures in which there’s a fully-functioning online economy, in which it’s normal to pick up piecemeal work. In that world, social gamers may fit in perfectly.

For a bit more on Gambit workers, it might also be worth checking out this May blog post from CrowdFlower, which breaks down the worker demographics and offers a few more surprises, like the high educational level of some people working for virtual currency.